1st June 2004 Archive

Hutchison Whampoa has issued a denial that it is considering pulling out of "3" - its UK third generation phone service. The Business, a UK Sunday newspaper, this week claimed that the company was mulling the closure of 3 UK to focus on faster-growing countries.

How's this for irony? The Taiwanese authorities boasted on Saturday that they'd caught a notorious hacker, author of the Peep Trojan program and the Randex series of email worms. In Germany, around the same time, they were celebrating the capture of the author of Sasser and the author of Netsky. So it was painfully ironic that it was the Sasser virus which disabled the Computex show network here in Taipei.

The end of the nineties were a boom time for IT spending in financial services technology as front-office technologies surged ahead on the back of advancing Web and state-of-the-art screen-based technology.

Moving data between computers has always posed problems, particularly to those charged with ensuring that systems (especially Personal systems) run efficiently and legally whilst any valuable data is sufficiently protected. In the old days of the early nineties floppy disks were employed to shift information (and viruses) between PCs. Whilst email is today often the major transportation system employed, the use of USB memory stick devices is growing.

Burger behemoth McDonalds is doing a marketing deal with Sony to promote its download music service. Under the terms of the agreement buyers of Big Macs will receive a voucher for a free download, according to the Financial Times.

Having recently announced its first hard disk drive-based portable media player to support both audio and video, Sony settled a decades-long dispute with a German who claimed to have invented the technology which led to the Walkman.

Two men have been arrested amid allegations that they were involved in a bid to extort billions of Yen from Japanese outfit Softbank Corp. Yutaka Tomiyasu (24) and Takuya Mori (35) were arrested at the weekend in connection with the leak of confidential information concerning Internet users earlier this year.

The chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, Michael Soden, has quit his job after porn was found on his company PC. Shares in the bank have been buoyed up by the news, which has sparked speculation of a takeover.

Staff at Carphone Warehouse are not getting paid the minimum guaranteed by UK employment law. The phone shop tops up staff salaries if they fail to meet the legal requirement of £4.50 an hour but takes the money back from later payments if their commission increases, according to the Scotsman.

A French company has developed a disposable DVD, or DVD-D, which self-destructs after a few hours. Like the classic DVD, DVD-D is made of polycarbonate, but it contains an extra layer of coating that reacts to an oxidisation process which begins as soon as the disc is exposed to air. The self-destruct process can be pre-set to occur between eight and 24 hours.

For centuries, military organizations have relied on scouts to gather intelligence about the enemy. In the field of information security, few scouts have ever existed. Very few organizations today know who their enemies are, how they might attack, when they might attack, and, perhaps most important, why they attack. The Honeynet Project is changing this.

The Chinese government is setting up a special committee to review and if necessary censor online games. Games which break the constitution, threaten national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity will be banned. Anything which threatens "state security, damaging the nation's glory, disturbing social order and infringing on other's legitimate rights" will also be banned.

Over 300 government IT staff will transfer to IBM as part of an outsourcing deal that will see the tech giant take over the day-to-day running of IT systems for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), for up to 17 years.

The Irish government is to build a national register of 3G mobile phones - and by extension, their users - that are capable of carrying video clips. The protection of minors is an "absolute necessity" which outweighs concerns over costs and practicality, Dermot Ahern, communications minister, said.

Colossus Mk2, the first ever programmable computer and a crucial piece of WWII history, has been rebuilt. Old code breakers who worked with the machine during the war were given an preview of the machine in action, as part of the D-Day celebrations in at the Science Museum in London.

Sony is walking away from the PDA market in the United States and Europe, citing flat sales. It will continue to develop its PalmOS-based Clie range in Japan, but won't develop any new models outside its home country beyond the most recent addition to the range, the TH-55 that it released in February. The global PDA market shrank 11 per cent in the first three months of this year, according to IDC, although shipments jumped by a third in Europe where Sony snagged a 9.3 per cent share.

Sun Microsystems has filled a large gap in its processor roadmap and solved some financial problems by announcing today a deal with Fujitsu that will see Sun pick up Fujitsu's version of the SPARC processor for high-end servers.